Thursday, 6th December by dex
Laziness is not a crime - 15:14
This update has been shamelessly delayed with the excuses being in order: laziness, lack of time, laziness, net problems yesterday and finally LAZINESS. The update is also remarkable because every of the 4 most active staff members has done at least one demo (or 10). But now that you finally can get to watching the demos from last month, I apologize for the long wait and stop rambling.
Let's start with the episode stuff. Michael Hudson has exposed us to the horror that is rogue, namely the dreaded and feared r1m4. The Easy Run he improved by 1 second was already in his possession, but he did it nevertheless. 42 seconds of evading death mark his return to making demos after, well, a while. :)
Forcing me to do 'gamedir digs01', Flavio Quadros has Ran the realm of d7, and he did it on the Easy difficulty: this 0:46 ER is the result of his courageous running. It's not the end of the digs01 demos for today, but this will be covered later...
Another of the staff members, Richard Skidmore, has noticed that there is a hole in the tables that is there for almost a decade. This revelation has led him to creating a Nightmare Run of black episode, in exactly 7:45, a shameless table filling action. But he didn't just stop there, no! Quite the contrary, it left him pumped up enough to do a Nightmare 100% of the very same episode. Filled with incredibely precise misses and perfectly fluent stuck-ups, this entertaining bit of speedrunning is 11:52 long, 43 seconds better than Tim Doherty.
Basil de Vries did a Nightmare 100% on dmc1m4. The first to happen was this pretty nice 1:37, which is 19 seconds faster than his earlier endeavours on the map. However, being Orbs and all, he first sent us a message, without the demo. Whooops. Then he decided to improve the demo some more and the result is this 1:29, further 8 seconds faster. Learning from his previous mistake with submission, he did THE EXACT SAME THING once again, sending us an empty message first. A monkey would have learned by now ;).
With this stupid joke behind us, time to go back to Flavio again. Using the knowledge imparted unto us by the mighty Grandma of speedrunning, Morfans, he did a Nightmare 100% on gibplex, again in 0:44, this time getting all the kills. 44 seconds faster than Richard.
And finally, the last record in this update that does not feature NahkahiiR. I went back to the very beginnings and made an improvement on the map that is known as hhouse. And I improved the Easy 100% by exactly two seconds to achieve this 1:46. Curse the decimal!
Time for a total antithesis of laziness, at least in the demo making department. Jaakko Alakopsa! He had a part in 10 demos in this update. The first three are a lonely work, single player demos. He took czg_moon as his first target. The Easy 100% by Amrik Kochhar was improved by 32 seconds, this 2:03 being the result. Then, the Nightmare 100% by Justin Fleck was improved using the same means as the EH. This 2:31 improves the earlier record by 54 seconds.
The next target in Nahk's killing spree was his own Easy 100% of q1tm3_hrim2_V2. It's name may be long, but this new 1:39 certainly is not. 10 seconds shorter than the earlier demo.
And finally, the coops. A lot of them. Mostly created by two men (at least according to the official info ;)): Aleksander Osipov and Jaakko Alakopsa. Those two have organised a mini-speedcon, except it wasn't like a speedcon at all and it was just two of them replaying the same coop demos over and over. Bearing that in mind, their demos were mostly iD stuff, so you can't fault them for not having a good choice of what to improve.
That's all for today. In case I don't get an occasion, and I probably won't because you all are lazy bastards, Happy Christmas, New Year's Eve and also Easter.
Wednesday, 14th November by NahkahiiR
The fish is no longer alive - 14:07
For a time, digs01 was a silent episode. Nothing happened there. Then it met its destiny and was dragged into the SDA. The peaceful times in that place are over.
This week's story starts from d1 where I improved my "old" Nightmare 100% by 9 seconds to get a 0:58.
The next target was d2 where I beat Richard Skidmore's Nightmare 100% by 2 seconds with a very sloppy demo. The new record stands at 1:43.
Finally Flavio Quadros did what I had expected to happen on ds, a zombie boost! His Easy Run through the level took only 37 seconds. That's 5 seconds faster than Daniel Andersson.
In d5 I improved my own Nightmare 100% by 32 seconds to get a 1:56.
In d6 I beat Richard's Nightmare 100% by 34 seconds to get a 3:08.
In d7 I beat Richard's Nightmare 100% by 58 seconds to get a 3:46.
Remaining single player demos were recorded on custom maps. First off we go to coagula3 where Basil de Vries improved his own Easy 100% demo from the stone age by 21 seconds, in 2:06.
The most interesting map in this update is gibplex. First Flavio beat Karol Urbanski by 7 seconds in the Nightmare 100% category, to get a 0:44. Then, Richard Skidmore submitted two trick demos. There are no really insane tricks in his demos, however, the trick is to have slower time than the previous record! How is that possible? The map had a bug that made a fish spawn inside a wall. That's why others didn't get all kills on the map. After finding out what was wrong he recorded Easy 100% and Nightmare 100% in 1:23 and 1:28, "beating" Karol by -32 seconds and Flavio by -44 seconds, respectively.
Next up is sm28. Flavio beat my Easy Run by 9 seconds to get a 1:31. For a long time, the Nightmare Run had been an empty slot. Richard continued his tablefilling efforts with a 2:39. A day later, Flavio submitted a 67 seconds improvement: 1:32.
One day, Laurent Mertens wanted to beat a Thomas Bergendorff demo on a forgotten map - rettear. He chose the Easy 100% and owned lodis by 3 seconds to get a 1:52. Nice job!
Finally, I did some coops with Basil. In the Ogre Citadel, we beat Nolan Pflug and Justin Fleck's ancient Nightmare 100% by 7 seconds to get a 1:02. Logically, we moved on to the Crypt of Decay where we owned Richard Skidmore and Thomas Stubgaard's hangoverish Nightmare 100% by 16 seconds in 1:43. As a last demo in this update, we go back to the digs01 episode. In d4 we recorded a tablefiller (single player time 1:02) in 40 seconds!
Oh, I almost forgot one thing. Jozsef Szalontai has released a new version of Joequake and for some reason did not tell about it in the news page. However, he told us about the changes: "Cosmetic changes that should make watching demos and avi capture more pleasurable in GL."
I hope I didn't forget anything else. :-P
Friday, 2nd November by dex
Finally - 20:05
You people are weird. First we barely get demos over a period of an entire month before we can finally do an update. Then you send so many this update happens a week after, and has more demos than usual. Let's just hope it is not a momentary wake-up, and that the demos will be flowing to our mailbox in large quantities from now on.
Not unlike a kid that gets candy from his grandfather, I was very happy to see a marathon on digs01 episode by Richard Skidmore in my mail. The good, old, entertaining feel of his demos is very easily noticed thorough this Nightmare Run in 4:57, which is a tablefiller. Due to reasons unknown (I'm leaning towards laziness :)), Morfy didn't use a nice trick in d1. Not that the marathon is less awesome to watch that way. A kid that gets candy for free always wants more - I'm eagerly awaiting for more demos from Richard. He also took part in a small war that ensued on the d6 map from this episode...
The first strike in this truly epic campaign was Laurent Mertens's doing. He sent in a Nightmare Run that finished the map in 1:13, filling a hole on the SDA battlefield. Richard retaliated achieving a time 5 seconds faster, to get 1:08. Then, in a desperate counter-counter attack, Laurent got 1:05, 3 seconds faster, which is the fastest time currently. Tom Nguyen joined the fighting with his Easy Run, which took exactly 0:54, 10 seconds better than Laurent Mertens. That's it for today's news from the d6 front, let's hope the fighting will continue so that the demos come quickly :).
I have added 2 demos to this update myself, both of them on a map called gibplex. Easy 100% was finished in 0:51, 4 seconds faster than the old record by Justin Fleck. Nightmare 100% achieved the same time, again 4 seconds better than Justin. I wanted to do more, but I didn't have much time to do running. Shame on me.
Right, that was the last of the records that didn't include Jaakko Alakopsa bunnyhopping and blasting enemies. The insane demo machine really got to work in the last days, no doubt an effect of the motivation after getting the iD record. First, he was upset by the small number of TO's in his collection - only two - so he added another one. The map he did it on is gordian. Easy Run, which was in Kip Werking's possession, was improved by a minimal second to achieve 1:26. NahkahiiR stuck to the 'the minimum to get the job done' type of thinking and did the Easy 100% in 2:02, 2 seconds faster than Justin Fleck. Optic's Nightmare 100% was improved by just one second, 2:59 being the new time. The largest improvement was 7 seconds in the Nightmare Run category - 1:53, another record shamelessly taken from mister Fleck.
Jaakko moved on to ih1m4, where he took both the 100% records. The Easy one is 1:42 now, and the new Nightmare time is 1:59. Improved by 6 and 7 seconds respectively, they were both taken form Justin Fleck. Boy, he sure lost a lot of records today!
Anyway, back to expanding NahkahiiR's demo collection. He did wishes Nightmare 100% in 3:08, beating Nolan Pflug by 6 seconds. That's about the end of the single player demos.
We also got 4 coops in the last week, all of them featuring Jaakko Alakopsa. First, he teamed up with David Spickermann to wreak havoc in the digs01 episode. d1 got a bit of 2-player Easy 100% treatment in 0:29. The single player time is 0:44. Then, there's a tablefiller for the 2-Player Easy 100% on d5 - the single player time is 1:17, but the team Nahkahiir+LLCoolDave does it in 0:56. As a late addition to the d6 war, they also did a 2-Player Easy Run of that in 0:33 (SP time 1:04). The final demo for today is a collaborative effort of Jaakko Alakopsa and Aleksander Osipov, on d4. The 2-Player Easy Run time hole is now filled with this 0:20, while a single player has done it in 0:29.
Right, that's about it. Keep us occupied with updates and swarmed with demos :).